Designed for a wide audience, this exciting new work provides an easy and intuitive presentation of traditional economic and financial topics. Whether you are a professional economist, social scientist, or just interested in gaining a better grasp on our country’s economics, this book will provide a refreshing approach to traditional topics. It will give the reader plenty of information to help form their own opinions about important policy issues without relying on ideologues and political operatives for information. With topics relevant to everyday news it’s easy for the reader to obtain the economic knowledge and historical context to become an informed citizen!

This "very short introduction" was fine. One point it hammered home was that there is a historical connection between high wages and growth. That came up repeatedly. Another interesting idea for me was that without the Industrial Revolution, without growth, without, I guess, consumerism, a lot of us would work hard just to subsist. The book gave me a good impression of how various factors interact and why some nations have been more successful than others. Folks, education is much more important than the military. Likewise, giving the so called job creators too big a piece of the pie is good for them in the short term, but not good for long term prosperity. It's bad for everyone in the long term...

It is interesting to chart the rise of the modern state, which in a way began back in the Renaissance and the period in European history known as the Babylonian Captivity (when the Papacy was moved from Rome to Avignion) to the modern day, and to see how all of the events are interconnected with each other. This book, though, probably should have the title of Protestantism and the rise of Capitalism, namely because it was through the Protestant Reformation that the individual gained the freedom to make their own choice as to how and where to (and whether to) worship God.

 

 

I don't necessarily believe that Capitalism is in and of itself a Christian concept, and in particular the Capitalism that is practised today is far from it. The Bible constantly exhorts us to consider and help the poor and the disadvantaged, and Jesus even says 'what you do for the least of these you do for me'. It is hard though, living in a wealthy and industrialised society, yet being a member of the middle class where we still need to work and we have to save for all the goodies that we want, to actually understand the plight of the poor in the developing world.

 

 

What the Reformation did though was to break us from the rules and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and one of them was the rule against lending at interest. However, it was not lending at interest that was bad, but lending at interest to a fellow Christian (which is what usury is). In the same way it is not bad for a Muslim to sell alcohol, just not sell it to a fellow Muslim.

 

 

What the removal of usury did was to create a means for individuals to be able to borrow funds to invest in business projects, though in those days the risk was still very high. For instance, there was a film I saw a while ago called Rob Roy where a Scottish farmer borrows money to trade livestock, only to have the baron from whom he borrowed from set him up so that he would lose all of the livestock and then land up in debt.

 

 

While such dubious schemes were not done away with immediately, what the Protestant religion has done is that it has influenced Western society to make us think more about acting ethically and consciously for the good of others. William Wilberforce brought an end to slavery in the British Empire, which had a knock on effect in the United States. While the French revolution was purely a secular event (since the French had nipped the Reformation in the bud during the St Bartholemew's Day Massacre) this revolution had a knock on effect in England where Parliament was forced to continue to reform.

 

 

The same goes with many of the left wing agitators in Britain and Germany, which forced the conservative government to invest in private education and healthcare, and when the Russian revolution occurred, this strengthened the Unions and the Labor parties to encourage their own countries to provide better services for the underpriviledged classes so that there would not be a similar revolt here.

 

However, I would not say that Capitalism is itself Christian, and in a way it is moving from the days where people were forced to change or die back to a feudal system when governments are sidelined and corporations are taking the role of the new lords. A man borrows money from a bank to start up an enterprise, only to discover that the corporate lords have raised the barriers to entry. In fact, family businesses are being destroyed by low cost retail, and many of these people who would live comfortably on their own business are being forced into bankruptcy and then into the ranks of the poor.

 

Also many Christians are taking the mantel of personal responsibility on board suggesting that if somebody is in trouble then they must have done something wrong to do that. Further, there is also the idea of dependency, such this meme:

 

 

The idea is that we cannot help the poor because if we help the poor, they will only become a greater burden to us, and thus they must pull themselves up by their own effort, particularly if another has managed to do that.

 

However the idea is trumped by the statement that these people don't need a handout (and many of them do not want a handout) but rather a hand up. In many cases the only reason the poor are forced to rely on handouts is because nobody is there to give them a hand up. As cuts are made to healthcare and education, many people are getting left further and further behind. People are caught in Westernised slums where they cannot get a job because of the belief that all people from that area (such as Elizabeth in South Australia) are all the same and are not employable. To be honest, one of the major aspects as to whether you get an interview or not is your postcode.

 

A friend at lawschool recommended this book to me after I had decided to read the works of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes in the hope that I could glean some ideas on how to become wealthy. My belief was that wealth lay in understanding the basics of economics, and when it came to economics, I believed that the basics could be found in a number of authors that my American History lecturer had mentioned who had been quintessential in determining the economic policy of the time. My friend then recommended this book to me, and in a way I am glad he did because by reading this book I came to understand that there are more than just four people who developed the social science known as economics.

Now, I noticed one review on Goodreads making a comment about whether economics actually is a science. In my opinion it is a science, but it falls into the category of 'soft' or 'social' science, as opposed to the 'hard' or 'physical' sciences. The differences between the two sciences is that the hard sciences tend to be easier to measure and determine than the soft sciences. However, just because a field of study cannot be measured quantitatively, it does not mean that it is any less of a science than say physics or chemistry. To be blunt, hard sciences are based just as much on conjecture and supposition as is history, economics, and political science. If one wants to get into something that rests purely on hard facts, then the best you can get is mathematics, and even then one can prove anything with mathematics simply by starting off with a specific proposition.

As for becoming wealthy by reading the works of the great economists; once again that is pure supposition. It is possible, but in the end the only way to wealth is either through hard work, connections, luck, or a mixture of all three. However, by understanding the theories put forward by the economists, one can understand the way commerce works, and by understanding it, can use one's knowledge to take advantage of such things. However, remember this, many of these economists were hardly wealthy in an of themselves: Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen for instance. Also, just because a Nobel prize winning economist says something does not necessarily mean that it is right. The founders of Long Term Capital Management won Nobel prizes for their mathematical equation used to determine the price of options, and then proceeded to send the United States to the brink of economic collapse. The same goes with Milton Friedman, who continually praised the free markets and the invisible hand, only to die a few months prior to the entire edifice collapsing. We are still living in the aftermath of the banking crisis which has effectively crippled the developed world, as well as bringing the developing world down with it.

As for the book, I found it quite enlightening as he explores who he believes were the major contributors to the economic theories that fly about the world today. Economics was not invented with Adam Smith, people have been buying and selling, and participating in complex financial transactions long before he came around. Insurance had existed as far back as the ancient times, and the bond market grew out of the sophisticated banking systems of Renaissance Italy. What Adam Smith did was step back, look at what was going on, and wrote it down. Even then he wasn't the first as people have been developing economic theory long before he appeared on the scene. In fact, it is interesting to note that Verblen flagged the Christian Church as being the first example of a franchise.

Studying economics, and postulating economic theory, is not going to make you rich, but what it is going to do is to help you understand how trade and commerce work. However, like all of the soft sciences (and even the hard sciences) opinions are going to differ. Some are going to point at a single passage in Adam Smith and claim that the market works best when left alone, whereas I will point at Adam Smith and show that he believes that one of the ways to completely ruin an economic system is to allow businessmen to influence and run the government. Some will say that greed is good, whereas I will say that greed is destructive, and the thing is that I believe that I am right, but others will violently disagree. In the end, I guess that is why they ended up executing Socrates and Jesus Christ, among others, simply because their world views rubbed the wrong people up the wrong way. In the end, who cares, if I go the way of Socrates and Jesus Christ, at least my theories will survive the test of time.

http://pro-libertate.net/20110902/173-read-history-economic-thought